"the choice of bell hooks, her great-grandmother, which she put in lowercase letters, said to us that it is not me, Gloria Watkins, who is the most important; it’s what these words are and the model of my great-grandmother Bell Hooks, who stays in my consciousness. And the small letters also captured, I think, bell hooks’s always transgressive oppositional self. So, I’m not going to even use capital letters. I’m not going to use my name. I’m going to use my transgressive great-grandmother’s name on those books...fundamentally, she was a teacher. And by “teacher,” I meant she believed that her audience was broader than the academy or broader than higher education, and she wanted to reach the largest number of people, regular people, young boys, children, that she could. And she wanted to have the broadest impact on the broadest amount of people. And so, when I think of bell hooks, I think about her primarily as a teacher...And she was very much impacted by teachers. She was very much impacted, for example, by the Buddhist person Thich Nhat Hanh. And I think that she saw herself in some ways as a person who would sit with — sit with — young people and community people and students and help them understand this world in which we live, which is full of all kinds of domination. So I see her as a teacher...She was hard-hitting. She was sometimes merciless in her critiques. She was unrelenting. She was courageous. She was in your face. But she was also gentle. And I was just listening to that sort of soft voice, gentle spirit, passionate and always, always trying to tell the truth, from her perspective...She wanted little Black boys to love themselves. She wanted little Black girls with so-called nappy hair to love themselves, which is why she wrote that book about — of being nappy. So we might think about love as a sort of innocuous, trivial, nonpolitical project, but she knew that loving ourselves, all people, but particularly people of color and Black people in the U.S., to love ourselves is a radical political act. And that’s one of the people’s favorite books, All About Love, because I think we understood that, that if you don’t love yourself, if you don’t engage in self-love, you cannot possibly change the world. And so, that was an extremely important intervention in terms of her writings...Her constant naming of imperial white supremacist patriarchy, which can also be framed if we borrow Kimberlé Crenshaw’s term “intersectionality” — bell didn’t use the term “intersectionality.” She wanted us to hear “imperial white supremacist patriarchy” — and later she added “heteropatriarchy” — because she wanted to name what that was. But it is essentially the concept of intersectionality, which goes back to the 19th century Black women, such as Maria Stewart and Ida B. Wells. And so she never stopped saying it, “imperial white supremacist heteropatriarchy,” because she wanted us to hear it over and over and over again so that we could eradicate it...she always insisted, lived the life that she wanted to live, lived it on her own terms."